Imagine your daughter goes to the hospital with a headache. She’s sent home with meds. The next morning, her boyfriend finds her gasping for air. She’s rushed to a hospital. A CT scan reveals multiple blood clots in her brain. She’s declared brain-dead.

That was more than three months ago.

Now, imagine that instead of grieving, you’re setting up a GoFundMe—not to help pay for her recovery, but to keep your 30-year-old daughter’s body on life support. Why? Because she was pregnant when she died, and doctors are telling you that they are not legally permitted to take her off life support.

Your daughter is dead, but her uterus has been hijacked.

This is the nightmare April Newkirk is living. Her daughter, Adriana Smith—a Black nurse from metro Atlanta—was declared brain-dead on Feb. 19, 2025, days after she first began complaining of persistent headaches, according to her online fundraising page. Yet Emory University doctors have informed her family that they cannot legally take Smith off life support. On May 13, Smith was transferred from Emory University Hospital to another facility—Emory Midtown—which plans to keep Smith “alive” until the fetus can survive outside the womb, which, in this case, is likely around 32 weeks, according to local TV news station 11Alive. Georgia’s strict abortion law prohibits most abortions after fetal cardiac activity is detected—typically around six weeks into pregnancy—and grants “personhood” to fertilized embryos.

It’s not clear, based on the information available and on statements made by Georgia public officials, that the state’s abortion ban applies to Smith’s case or whether doctors simply fear it might. The family told local media they believed the abortion ban was to blame.

“Emory Healthcare uses consensus from clinical experts, medical literature, and legal guidance to support our providers as they make individualized treatment recommendations in compliance with Georgia’s abortion laws and all other applicable laws,” the hospital said in a statement released to several local and national media outlets. “Our top priorities continue to be the safety and wellbeing of the patients we serve.”

Another potentially relevant law is the pregnancy exclusion in Georgia’s advance directive law, which would void a patient’s advance directive if they were pregnant with a viable fetus.

Smith’s pregnancy may or may not be viable. She was only nine weeks pregnant when she died. Cases like Smith’s are rare, but in nearly every instance I could find globally where brain-dead women were kept on life support to gestate a fetus, the pregnancies were much further along—usually 16 weeks to 22 weeks. A 2021 study published in the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology found that when maternal brain death occurred on or before 14 weeks of gestation, roughly 50 percent of fetuses were delivered alive. Complications from maternal brain death can cause neonatal blindness, neurological disorders, and other disability.

For three months, Newkirk has sat by her daughter’s bedside with Smith’s 7-year-old son, who thinks that his mom has just been sleeping the whole time. Smith’s family has not expressed that they would remove her from life support, ending the pregnancy–just that they would like to have the choice.

“This decision should’ve been left to us,” Newkirk told 11Alive on May 13, 2025. “Now we’re left wondering what kind of life he’ll have—and we’re going to be the ones raising him.”

Meanwhile, Smith’s family is trying to raise $275,000 to pay for their daughter’s compulsory care.

This doesn’t seem fair.

Back in 2019, I wrote about a groundbreaking bill introduced by former South Carolina State Sen. Mia McLeod, a Democrat turned Independent, called the Pro-Birth Accountability Act. The proposed legislation would cover living, legal, medical, and mental health costs tied to an unwanted pregnancy—from prenatal care through postpartum. Once there’s a detectable “fetal heartbeat,” you could even claim the fetus as a dependent for tax purposes.

“Just as South Carolina may not constitutionally use a citizen’s rental property without just compensation,” the bill read, “it may not constitutionally require a woman to incubate a child without appropriate compensation.”

McLeod’s bill also promised home visits from a trained nurse until the child turns 2 years old, as many countries do to support new parents (hi, Sweden), and public assistance benefits, including food stamps, until the child turns 18. McLeod’s bill would also have required South Carolina to put money in a trust to pay for the child’s higher education. And if the pregnancy causes a disability for the pregnant person, the state must foot the bill. Same if the child is born with a disability—for life. The bill has been reintroduced several times but has gone nowhere in South Carolina’s Republican-controlled legislature.

In 2023, Georgia lawmakers introduced a similar bill that would make Georgia financially responsible for the outcomes of unwanted pregnancies that can no longer be terminated legally.

I think this is a righteous legislative effort, but I recognize that it raises uncomfortable issues. Ideally, we wouldn’t live in a world where a state can or should pay to rent a person’s womb. The fact that Adriana Smith is Black makes the idea even more disquieting. Assigning monetary value to pregnancy—to laboring, birthing, and raising a human being—hews dangerously close to this country’s grotesque history of using Black women as vessels and property.

But we are in a human rights crisis here. Roughly 43 percent of Americans now live in a state where people capable of becoming pregnant are second-class citizens whose bodies can be commandeered by the government. People are already being forced to carry pregnancies to term, and then raise children they didn’t plan for. Smith has been turned into a brain-dead incubator. Until Americans claw back our reproductive autonomy, I find paying material support for people like her less “uncomfortable” than her mom’s GoFundMe.

Smith’s plight is so horrifying that legislation like the Pro-Birth Accountability Act does not even account for this situation. That bill would have required a signed affidavit from the pregnant person attesting that they would get an abortion if not for the state’s six-week ban. Beyond the obvious loophole here (cynical opportunists could claim any pregnancy is unwanted to get benefits) lies an even starker one: Smith is medically dead. She can’t sign an affidavit.

Smith’s case is such a nightmare that I could find only one similar case. In Campo Largo, Brazil, a woman named Frankielen da Silva Zampoli Padilha was kept on life support for 123 days in 2017 until her twins could be delivered. She was also declared brain-dead at nine weeks pregnant. But two things separate Smith’s case from Padilha’s: Padilha’s husband Muriel was overjoyed at his children’s birth, according to the New Zealand Herald (they were healthy when delivered). It was his choice. Moreover, he didn’t have to pay for that choice because Brazil has universal health care. The U.S. does not.

This kind of thing has happened at least once before in the U.S.—in Fort Worth, Texas, in 2014. Marlise Muñoz was declared brain-dead, but because she was pregnant, John Peter Smith Hospital refused to remove life support due to the pregnancy exclusion in Texas’ advance directive law. Her family sued the hospital and won. On January 26, 2014, the hospital removed Muñoz from life support, following a judge’s order.

Smith’s situation is appalling but, in my view, entirely predictable. The U.S. government has always had a vested interest in controlling women’s bodies—especially Black women’s. This is just the latest chapter in a long, infuriating history.

It’s monstrous, but it is the natural result of the anti-abortion movement’s project to subject pregnant bodies to state control. And the price tag is high.